MP3 tunes is a new company. Why would you go back to a crowded industry? I felt compelled because I didn't like the direction the world was going.

Demo of two products. I want it to be easy to get music and play it anywhere. It shouldn;t be harder to buy music and get it on a portable player than it is to get on an airplane. And thats what it is today.

We need to push the world back to an open standard, and that's MP3. So the name of the company is MP3tunes.

Does the world need another music store? Yes. Because most of them are rental shops. They control what you can do with it, what you can copy it to.

I think if you pay money for music, yuou should be able to use it any way you want, on any device.

It's not iTunes. It's theirTunes. Apples controlling whether you can play it on this portable device, whether you can copy it to a Linux computer -- which you can't, by the way. I did send an email to Steve Jobs, saying "Hey Steve, how about supporting AAC and iTunes on Linux? To give him credit, he did reply back to me. Fortunately, it was a one-word answer. It was "Nope." That's it. Not even a hi or a bye. Just "Nope."

I like the model where, if you pay for the music, it's yours. Forever. 88/8.88 About 330,000 songs, 28,000 artist, all the songs are high quality, 192kbps. It

s very consumer-friendly. It works with all kinds of platforms. Lijnux, OS X , Windows. Sorks through a web browser. All it requires is a player. Doesn't matter if it's iPod or Creative . Music locker. when you biuy music, it's their for you. Once uou biuy it, it's in your locker forwever. I want to make it easy. No personl use restrictions.

chart driven music website. based on what they're selling.

The record labels aren't ready yet.

Meanwhile, the Linspire distro keeps improving.

When I arrived at the Desktop Summit, I was greeted by Kendall Dawson, whose Linspire card bears the title "community liaison". He shoved a Linspire 5.0 beta CD in my Via-based eNote notebook computer (which I obtained from Linspire at the first Linux Desktop Summit, but rarely used), and made a clean install of the Debian-based OS. Everything went smoothly, and the rejuvenated notebook immediately met my minimum laptop requirements: 1) It saw and connected to the Net through the Wi-Fi card in its PCMCIA slot; 2) It hibernated when the lid closed and returned to its full waking state when the lid opened; 4) It let me obtain and instal the small pile of software I wanted to run -- and did it far more easily than any Linux distro I've ever used.

There were still a few small problems. It didn't recognize my digital camera's memory card when I plugged a reader into a USB port. Same with the flash memory stick that also serves as the laptop-side interface for a remote controller I use to operate slide shows. Then again, it's not easy to get my ThinkPad T40 running SuSE (9.1) to do the same things.

What impressed me about Linspire when I first looked at it (and it was still called Lindows) was its Click 'N Run (CNR) program browser and installer. The front end of CNR is a directory arranged to look and work like a store that gives away most of its merchandise (there's no shortage of free-as-in-beer goods out there). The back end is apt-get. (Earlier versions had stand-alone apt-get functionality, but since users run as root in Linspire, this caused problems. So apt-get functionality is commented out in 5.0. Expert users, of course, can fix that.)

And cheap, as mainstream not-free (as in beer) products go. As I write this, 5.0 isn't quite out yet, and the company is running a sale on 4.5 for $20. It's normally 49.95.

It's having an effect. After we came out with a $499 laptop at Walmart.com, suddenlyu some of the big computer retailers started doing loss-leader laptops at $500.

There are more businesses using Linspire than people know. We are very wary about talking about this, because we don't want the Microsoft salesguys coming down on Linspire coustomers.

We're not here for the quick buck. We're not going away. I'm here and available at this whole conference. See if Larry Elison is aorund for all of OracleWorld.

Fry's sells a $199 desktop box with the current minimum (AMD processor, 40GB hard drive, CD ROM, 128MB RAM, etc.)

We chare $5-10 per computer to Sub300 or whowever it is. That's what they pay us for the pre-install. If you compare that with XP, it's about 275 for the os and office suite. We sell CNR for $50 for a year. that's how we make money. That digital delivery/

It;s ready for walmart, compusa, best buy. How do you convince a retailer to start carryig a Linux line-up. That's what we're doing this year. Education. Let them see a powerpoint file open up.

You'll see desktop linux penetraing the mainstream world this year.

MP3 Beamer

Linspire needs to interact more with the Linux community. Show up at LinuxWorld, OSCon, eTech, and so on. Let the alpha geeks know what they're up to. I think Linspire will, in the next year, emerge as the supportable OS that Linux geeks want their parents to use.

My vision of the world is, you've got one place in the world to store yourall your music, and you can access it from anywhere on any devic.e CDs are the musical equivalent of socks. What I men byu that is, everytime I go to look for a dc I can't find it, and when I do find, it, there won't be a DC in it. ... or it's not the right CD.

We can do better, and that's the goal behind MP3 Beamer. It's what I call a DMR, digital music recorder. I'm copying DVR. 70% of homes ahdva a DVR. It records and plays back video, whenever they want it. Great. I want to do the saem thing for music. Why shouldn't you have a music box in youir hjouse?

Ltunes.

CNR.

We are easily the most easy to use and polished linux so far. We want to bring linux to the mainstream.

If I iwant an interective radio station, I have to geo to every publisher and get permission for that. Interactive radio is effectively illegal. if you want to take advantage of the internet,

If you want to create a radio station that has a fast-forward button that lets you skip a song if you don't like it, you can't do it. YOu have to go to every publisher, every label, and get a license. And if you go to negotiate, everybody wants a maximum royalty.

The record labels said, "We've always gotten screwed with radio. When we go to the Internet, that's not going to happen. And the publishers are saying, hey, we're only getting screwed with CD sales, where we're only getting 7.5% per song. So when we go to the Internet, we're getting our fair share. So: nobody gets anything, because they prevented the whole business.

There are defined rules for CD sales.

A lot of the open source community is opposed to DRM for political and social reasons. I'm with that. I'm also saying DRM is bad because it doesn't make money. I meet with record company guys, and they pound the table and say "DRM! DRM!" I say, "Isn't it about making money? 99.84% of the files tranferred on the Net are in MP3 format, and you're not being paid. Last time I checked your revenues were down 10% per year. Maybe you don't have the perfect startegy yet. Locks are good, if they're keeping the bad guy out. But they're not. They're keeping customers out. It's preventing making money!"